Alan Hollinghurst - The Swimming-Pool Library

Something masculine in him momentarily bridled, though the new pleasure of being called beautiful, which must have been the secret purpose of all his body-work, won over and he smiled with shy pride. ‘Do us a favour,’ he said. It was a moment at which a more experienced person could well have turned to admiration of my own, less ambitious, build.

As I prepared to go off into the gym I asked him, ‘What hotel is it you work in, actually?’

He was prefacing every remark with ‘Oh’ as if unsure of the way statements might begin. ‘Oh… the Queensberry, yes.’

‘Not far from here, then.’ I took my key from the lock.

‘No.’

‘Well, see you.’ I was making off down the alley of lockers and would soon have been lost to his view, when he said:

‘Yeah, you ought to come over some time.’

I half turned and grinned: ‘I’d like that.’ He didn’t grin back; in fact he looked very serious-and there had been something about the way he said ‘you ought to come over some time,’ casual and comradely and yet pondered, or even rehearsed, that convinced me that this was the same uptight, hungry boy I had blown in the Brutus, and that he needed my help, had passively picked on me as the one to show him what it was all about. I held his gaze a little longer, thinking of saying, ‘Well, how about tonight?’ Arthur-less, I was moronically ready for it, but somehow I deferred. I sensed he was relieved when I said, ‘Next week some time?’

‘OK.’ He lifted his right hand a few inches off the bench in a strangely touching, almost secret wave. Two other hearty figures pushed past me, coming in red and sweaty from the gym. ‘How’re ya doin’, Phil boy,’ said one of them in the routine American disguise of some British queens. I went on into the gym, believing that some kind of agreement had been made, that it filled his thoughts now as it did mine. Then for a few minutes I made myself think about something else, concentrated on my exercises on the mat, stretching and limbering up. Because I was so easily moved by people, I had learned to distance myself, just in those moments when I felt them taking hold: I made myself regard them, and even more myself, with a careless, almost cynical detachment. But as I gathered, spread and folded up my body now, endeavouring to feel alive all over, ready and independent, I saw Phil again, in one of those odd coups d’oeil , typical not only of his hesitant mobile manner but of so much of gay life, where happiness can depend on the glance of a stranger, caught and returned. Aptly enough, I was lying on my back, with my legs in the air, wide apart. Between them I saw him pass the open gym door, his bag in his hand, his shirt-sleeves rolled up in tight bands around his biceps. He went by, but a second or two later stepped back again, and peeped into the gym. Our eyes met, I raised my head, he looked for a moment longer, and then, moved perhaps by the secrecy which characterised his doings, without smiling, turned and went off. As I sat up it was as if a fist squeezed my heart and cracked a tiny flask at its centre, saturating it with love.

An hour or so later I found James in the shower. He held out his hands to me in a pathetic gesture; the fingertips were white and puckered.

‘A long time, eh?’ I commiserated.

‘There’s just been nothing, darling. I don’t know why I bother.’

‘Nor, I confess, do I.’ James, in his maudlin way, was waiting around for something worth looking at to stroll in. ‘How long, as a matter of interest?’

He had no watch on. ‘It may be as much as half an hour.’

‘You must be jolly clean, anyway.’ I pulled off my trunks, and noticed him peek, with the neutralised sexual interest that existed between us, at my dick.

‘Spotless. But enough of me. How are you?’

‘In a strange position.’

‘Tiring of His Speechlessness the Khedive of Tower Hamlets?’

‘Oh-no, that’s all over ages ago.’

‘Oh…’ A veneer of commiseration covered a discernible pleasure at the news. I chose not to expand on it.

‘No, it’s my queer peer, you remember? He wants me to write his life.’ James gave me an old-fashioned look.

‘Whitewash, I imagine?’

I considered this. ‘I think not, actually. He talks of handing over diaries, telling all.’

‘But what is there to tell?’

‘I think a lot. I’ve just been to see his memorabilia. It’s all very suggestive. He was in Africa for a long time, I gather. It’s the queer side, though, which would give it its interest. I have the feeling that’s what he wants made known.’

‘What’s his name?’

‘Nantwich, Lord, Charles.’

‘Oh really,’ said James irritatingly. ‘Well, it would be interesting, then.’

‘You know about him?’ I stumbled. Because he had come into my life up the back-stairs, I had fatuously assumed that no one else could have heard him announced.

‘A certain amount. He’s the sort of chap who crops up in the lives of other people. Kind of diplomatic-artistic, Harold Nicolsony circles. In fact, he must be about the last person in those circles not to have had his life written. You must do it.’

‘Well, I’m glad I asked you. I’ll get reading.’

‘He’s surely incredibly old.’

‘Eighty-three, he claims. He wanders rather, and it’s hard to tell what’s what and what, as it were, isn’t.’

‘What’s his house like, frightfully grand?’

‘Frightfully grandish. Very nice, actually-stuffed with pictures, blacks, for the most part. He has a somewhat terrifying servant who’s horrible to him and looks like a criminal. I must say I’ve become rather fond of the old boy. He has a Roman mosaic in the cellar and there are rather awful decorations of Romans with great big willies, Tom of Finland avant la lettre , but not what you expect to see in the homes of the aristocracy. Lord Beckwith, certainly, would frown on them…’

‘It’s too exciting. I’ll look some things up for you when I go home.’

I didn’t sleep well that night. It was hot enough to sleep without any covering, but I woke in the small hours feeling just perceptibly cold. The day’s spasm of emotion for Phil recurred and recurred, and the prospect of the Nantwich book, which was alluring, was also oppressive; suppressed guilt and helplessness over Arthur, as well, added their weight, and as the first light felt its way around the curtains, all the things which showed promise seemed only troublesome, agitating the white sheet of a future imagined without them. I started to fantasise over Phil, but didn’t have the heart for it, had at last no sensation of sex, somehow, in my person. I dozed off, and dreamt of having tea with him in the British Museum; there was a mood of intense restraint between us, and when I woke I could not believe that we could possibly become friends.

Uncharacteristically, though the birds were cheeping from four in the morning, I lay in bed slovenly and indecisive until eleven o’clock. By then I had more or less resolved not to write Charles’s memoirs, and to keep my life clear of interference from the demands and misery of other people. Even so, the vacuity of a whole wasted morning showed me how much I needed demands to be made. Sleepier for having overslept, I shaved as the bath ran, the steam repeatedly obscuring my image in the mirror. At first flushed with the heat of the water, I sprawled in the bath till it cooled. I remembered sharing a bath at school with the house tart Mountjoy (it rhymed with ‘spongy’) and the long talk with my housemaster, Mr Bast, which had ensued. Mr Bast had taken the opportunity, in that zealous, companionable way which housemasters have when they rediscover the pastoral nature of their vocation, to criticise the lack of one in me. ‘You’ve got a good brain, William,’ he said; ‘you’re good at games-and I can see why the other boys find you attractive (oh yes, I know all about that). But you should have better things to do with your spare time than messing around with Mountjoy. You lack vocation, William, that is what troubles me.’ At that disaffected age, I felt it was a lack to be proud of. In the following weeks I messed around with Mountjoy far more than before. ‘This is my vocation,’ I would tell him, as we met up after books and sloped off over to Meads for a quick one.